Political Candidates Prefer an American Public that Doesn't Ask Questions

Don't get me wrong. I do understand many things about the political process. It's just that the people that are asking us to vote for them, never cease to confuse my little mind by talking in circles, lying to the public and twisting the universe into their own sense of reality.

These servants of the people surround themselves with men and women who are incapable of individual thought and then proceed to insult the collective intelligence of their constituents. And we continue to allow them to do it! So perhaps it is us, the general public that I am so bewildered by. Why do we, as a collection of people with the freedom to select our government, allow the people we do select to lie to us while looking out for their own best interests instead of ours?

Case in point: I wanted to clarify some things about one of the candidates for U.S. Senate in 2006, so I sent a letter to the candidate asking several questions. In a nut shell, I asked the influential Congressman to clarify his stance on the following:

1. The integrity of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

2. Honesty and ethics in government, including adopting strict ethics policy, and the severity of punishment for violators of that policy.

3. Total government transparency with regards to lobbyists, campaign finance, and public records access.

I also asked him to explain his vote against the Lobbying Accountability and Transparency Act in May of 2006 and why people with money should have more influence over the legislature than those who are forced to live in the conditions that tax breaks for the wealthy leave them with. In closing, I asked the hopeful U.S. Senator where he stood on these issues that are important to America. I asked him to give me only straight answers and told him I was "sick of the BS, rhetoric, propaganda and flat out lies." I asked him to give me a reason to vote for him instead of his opponent.

A couple days later I got an email from his campaign that said, "Thank you for your email. I will pass the message along to the Congressman as well as his top aide handling this issue." I wonder which issue they were referring to.

Well neither the Congressman nor his top aid bothered to respond to the typed page and a half letter, so I still wonder if his opposition was lying about him or if he was lying defending himself against his opponents assertions and vice versa, et cetera, et cetera. This left me with no answers on election day.

How are the average U.S citizen and voter expected to make an educated choice about who to vote for? The answer I keep arriving at is we aren't supposed to understand what's going on in our government. Bureaucracy is designed to keep we, the people, confused and in the dark. I mean, God forbid the average American understand how things work! We might ask questions and insist on answers that contain more than propaganda and double talk.

It seems to me that the elected officials in our government would like to have as little contact as possible with their constituents. They only want to hear questions that they have a polished answer for. When a question is asked that really matters to the general population and would require an answer of substance, they would prefer to have someplace else to be. And they make sure their protectors don't even allow them to hear those questions.

The fact that more Americans aren't insisting on accountability from their representatives scares me half to death and leaves me wondering how far the American people are going to allow this democracy to disintegrate before doing something about it.

Answers or no answers, it's still up to us to force government to behave as they should.